Top 3 Tips For Painting Armies Faster!

You know what’s better than cranking out a brand new fully painting army and rolling up to the club to play it? Doing it in half the time.

That’s where tag team painting come in! I talked about group painting and collective paint nights in an article awhile back called Group Therapy for Miniature Painting. Two parts of this article sparked a lot of questions, so today I’ll answer one of them ( you’ll have to wait for next week to read the other).

Some years back, in 5th edition, me and my then roomie Stephane would spend one night hobbying. The whole living room was turned into a hobby studio and we would build and paint a whole army. In two or three sessions like this, whatever army we would want would be fully painted. We were degenerates back then, and over the course of autumn we probably had 6 whole armies.

So here’s how to do this part at home:

1- Find another like-minded degenerate

The premise of this is having a buddy to keep you accountable, focused and motivated on the task at hand: building armies like savages.

You don’t have to be roommates, but living close enough or having a decent meet-up place is required. This is either really easy or really hard, depending on your scene. Whatever you do, don’t get a Kevin.

2- Plan

We are big in planning in here. But because this is a two-hobbyist job, both of you degenerates need to be on the same page.

The first thing is expectations. Set up realistic goals and means of achieving those goals. If you’re plan is to win big painting competitions and your buddy is more the drybrush and dip type, it’s not going to work. Work and manage expectation to avoid eventual letdown.

The second thing is workload. The keyword for this is evensies. Split things right down the middle as much as possible. One week my army, one week yours and alternate this way.

The same goes if you plan to sell the army after. Buy all the models, split the cost right down the middle. Sell the models, split the profits right down the middle.

This serves 2 purposes:

Nobody feels cheated out of time and/or money

This is not rocket science, it’s model painting. Keep it as simple as possible.

3- Consistency

Every week means every week. It’s like date night with your loved one, you don’t postpone, you don’t plan stuff that day and you don’t cancel by text or by email. Commit do doing this and expect your tag team to commit as well. If you don’t show up when it’s not your stuff that you’re working on, how do you expect to get work done comes your turn.

About Hellfire Painting

Max Dubois is a hobby enthusiast from Quebec that runs most things named Hellfire Painting. Max produces a lot of hobby ressources that you can find on his own blog as well as well as on Spikey Bits.
He is always ready to talk shop with other enthusiasts, whether it's about, painting, playing or drinking, no matter your skill level in either those activities.
You can also find some of his work on amazon kindle, where he sells hobby e-books for a dollar!

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Spikey Bits is site about the hobby of tabletop wargaming. It is our mission to bring you the latest from the miniature wargaming scene, from narrative missions, hobby how to tutorials, battle reports, unboxings and reviews, retro flashbacks, news, rumors and more. We mainly cover Warhammer 40k, Fantasy, Age of Sigmar, Warmachine, Hordes, X-Wing, Infinity, Horus Heresy, and Star Wars Armada. We'll show you all the aspects of the hobby from converting and painting models to actually playing the game.